Part 2
### Chapter 1: Chapter 1
When Lara Hardgrove takes a position as a housemaid to keep her family's secrets buried, she expects hard work and anonymity. She doesn't expect to take a bullet for her employer's sister - or to find herself recovering in a guest room that looks unsettlingly like the bedroom she grew up in.
Complete Chapters 33
Rating 5.0 ( 8 reviews ) Age Rating mature
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Chapter 1
The Hardgrove name used to mean something.
It still does, technically. Old money, old land, the kind of family that appears in county records going back further than anyone has bothered to check. There’s a portrait in the upstairs hallway of our house — three generations of Hardgroves, stiff-backed and unsmiling, the way people posed when photographs were still an occasion. My father is in it. My brother and I are not, which tells you something about how quickly things can change.
My parents die on a Tuesday in March, on a road they’d driven a hundred times, in weather that hadn’t seemed particularly dangerous. I am seventeen. My brother Edward is nineteen. The extended family descends within the week — aunts and uncles and cousins twice removed who haven’t been to the house in years and suddenly have very strong opinions about what should happen to us.
Most of those opinions involve guardianship.
Edward fights it. I don’t know exactly how — I am seventeen and grieving and not paying close enough attention to the legal particulars — but he manages it. Has himself declared my guardian before anyone else can stake a claim. I remember being relieved. Edward is difficult and careless and sometimes infuriating, but he is mine, and the alternative is a house full of relatives I barely know making decisions about my life.
What I don’t understand then is that being my guardian also means being the guardian of everything else. The house. The accounts. The investments. All of it, in the hands of a nineteen-year-old boy who has just lost both his parents and is not, as it turns out, particularly well-equipped for the responsibility.
I don’t blame him for falling apart. I’ve thought about it enough, in the years since, to have arrived at something close to understanding. He is nineteen and alone and frightened and he finds something that makes him feel less frightened, and then he finds he can’t stop.
Gambling, at first, is social. Evenings out, a particular circle of friends, the kind of losses that can be explained away as the cost of entertainment. Then it isn’t social anymore. Then it is the only thing.
I notice the edges of it before I understand the shape. The grooms leave first — I assume it has something to do with the horses, some management decision I haven’t been told about. Then the horses themselves are gone, and I stop assuming. The housemaids go next, one by one, and then the cook, who leaves on a Thursday and takes a pearl necklace with her on the way out.
Edward points out, very quietly, that if we call the police we will also have to explain that we haven’t paid anyone on staff for two months. Three, in the cook’s case.
We sit in the large house, the two of us, and I look at the empty hallways and the unmade beds and the kitchen that no one is running anymore and understand, fully and finally, what has happened.
The money is gone. The house is mortgaged. We are, in every practical sense, finished.
I find the advertisement on a Thursday, in the back pages of a newspaper I pick up from the hall table mostly to have something to do with my hands. Housemaid required. Live-in position. The Mullen household. An address on the good side of town, the kind of address I recognize without having visited. Old money, or close enough to it. The kind of family that would have staff.
Then I fold the newspaper and put it back on the table and go upstairs and sit on the edge of my bed for a long time.
Then I go back downstairs and take the newspaper with me.
The servants’ entrance is at the side of the house, down a narrow path between the main building and the garden wall. I know to use it, which is something. I also wear my plainest dress and leave my good coat at home, which I hope is also something.
A woman opens the door — older, efficient, with the kind of hands that have been working a long time.
She looks at me the way she will continue to look at me for the next several weeks — with the swift, comprehensive assessment of someone who has seen a great many people come and go and has strong opinions about which category each of them falls into.
It isn’t a question. But she opens the door wider, and I take that as an invitation.
Inside, the kitchen is warm and loud and smells of something roasting. A man I will later know as Lev leans against the far counter, watching me with quiet interest. Maud gestures toward a chair at the long table and I sit in it and she sits across from me and asks where I’ve worked before.
“Smaller households,” I say. “Further out. Nothing in the city.”
Maud looks at me for a long moment.
“I’d rather not,” I say. “They were good situations and I left on good terms and I’d prefer not to cause any awkwardness.”
It’s thin. I know it’s thin. Maud knows it too — I can see it in her expression, the slight narrowing, the recalculation. Lev, from across the room, says nothing but is paying close attention.
I’m losing the room. I can feel it.
“I’d like to show you,” I say. “Rather than tell you. If there’s an opportunity.”
Maud looks at Lev. Lev looks at me.
“Lunch service in an hour,” Maud says finally. “Table needs laying. Lev will take you.”
The dining room is large — twelve seats, dark wood, the kind of table that expects to be taken seriously. Lev stands in the doorway with his arms crossed and watches me.
I stand at the head of the table and look at it for a moment.
I don’t know exactly how to explain what happens in my head when I look at a table that needs laying. It’s not something I think about consciously — it’s more that I see it already done, the finished picture, and I work backward from there. My father used to call it my camera memory. I read something once and I can see the page again whenever I need it, clear and complete, like a photograph.
I’ve read a great deal, in the years since my parents died. The library at home is enormous — three walls of floor-to-ceiling shelves, every subject you can think of — and I spend more time in it than anywhere else in the house. History, medicine, etiquette, household management. I read them all, not for any particular purpose, just because the library is warm and quiet and the books don’t ask anything of me.
It turns out they have been preparing me for something after all.
I work quickly. Lev tracks every placement without commenting. I name each piece as I set it down — not to show off, just because it helps me think — and when I’m done I step back and look at it and make two small adjustments and step back again.
Lev looks at the table for a long moment.
My room is small. A narrow bed, a table, a window that looks out onto the garden wall. The bathroom is shared, down the hall, one for all the house staff. I’m warned about this during what passes for an orientation — Maud, brisk and efficient, running through the rules with the air of someone who has given this speech many times and has no patience for questions she considers obvious.
Uniform is provided. Two sets — black dress, long, long-sleeved, no neckline, white apron, white cap. Black stockings, black shoes, both mandatory, both supplied.
“Comfortable shoes,” Maud says. “In this house you run. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
I nod and take the shoes and go to my room and sit on the narrow bed and look at what I’ve brought with me. Two changes of ordinary clothes, folded small. A book. The photograph of my parents that I keep on my bedside table at home, which I put face-down in the drawer because I’m not ready to look at it yet.
There are things I haven’t brought. Couldn’t bring, really — they would raise questions I’m not ready to answer. The good dresses, the jewelry, the small accumulated evidence of a life that looks nothing like this one.
I look at myself in the small mirror above the table — the uniform, the cap, the sensible shoes — and think: well. Here we are.
Then I go back downstairs, because there is work to do.
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### Chapter 2: Chapter 2
Metal striking wood, voices overlapping, something hissing on the stove. It hits me all at once — heat and noise and the particular smell of a kitchen that’s been running since before dawn. Bacon fat and coffee and something sweet underneath it all, pastry maybe.
I stop just inside the door and take it in.
Everyone in here moves like they know exactly what they’re doing and exactly where they fit. There’s a rhythm to it, practiced and tight, and I’m standing in the middle of it with no idea yet where I’m supposed to be.
Three days in and I’m still figuring that out.
Maud notices me first. She always does. Her gaze sweeps over me once — quick, deliberate — and something in her expression settles, like she’s just confirmed something she already suspected. She turns back to her work without saying anything.
Almost without saying anything.
“Careful,” she says, loud enough for the room. She’s not looking at me. “If I stopped to tolerate every bit of attitude from the girls in here, I wouldn’t be standing where I am now.”
I haven’t said a word. I came through the door.
A few of them smile — small, private smiles passed over counters and cutting boards. Not mean exactly. More like the easy amusement of people watching something familiar play out. New girl. Same routine.
Lev leans against the far counter, watching the exchange with quiet interest. He’s been here longer than anyone, I think, or at least he moves like he has. He doesn’t pile on and he doesn’t help. He just watches, with the kind of attention that suggests he finds people more interesting than most people find him.
“Since you seem to know how things should be done,” Maud says, turning to me properly now, “you can take breakfast upstairs.”
She gestures toward the tray on the side counter. It’s already assembled — pot, cups, a small plate of biscuits arranged just so. Someone here knows what they’re doing, even if they’d rather I didn’t notice.
A pause. Brief, but long enough to be deliberate.
“You leave the tray on the table, draw the curtains, and go. Quietly.”
Something about the way she says it sits wrong. Too specific. Too careful. But I don’t examine it. I’ve learned in three weeks that examining things too closely in this kitchen tends to make things worse. I take the tray.
The porcelain is warm under my fingers. The teapot is almost too hot where the heat seeps through the metal frame, radiating up into my palms. There’s something grounding about it — something to focus on that isn’t the room full of people watching me leave.
I grew up with trays like this one. I know the weight of them, the balance, the care it takes to carry them without the cups shifting. That much, at least, I know how to do.
The corridor outside the kitchen door is a different world entirely. The noise cuts off almost immediately. My footsteps are quiet on the runner, the morning light coming pale through the east-facing windows, still finding its angle. I take the back stairs up.
The house gets quieter the higher I go.
By the time I reach the upper corridor, the kitchen might as well not exist. There’s just the carpet underfoot and the closed doors on either side and the particular stillness of a house where most people are still asleep.
I slow as I approach, the way you do when you’ve been taught to. Listen before you knock. Always. I stop outside and wait.
Nothing. No movement. No voices.
I push the door open with my elbow and step inside.
The room is dim. The heavy curtains are drawn and the air is warm and close, the kind of warmth that builds up overnight in a closed space. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust.
A woman lies there, half-covered, still asleep. Dark hair across the pillow, one shoulder above the sheet. I don’t linger on it. I cross to the small table near the bed and set the tray down carefully — the faint clink of porcelain against wood the only sound I make.
I straighten and turn toward the window.
The curtains are heavy, velvet probably, the kind that block out the light completely. I reach for the edge of one —
— and the bathroom door opens behind me.
He steps into the room without hurry. His hair is still damp, dark strands falling across his forehead, and a towel sits low on his hips. He moves like someone who has never once been required to rush and has therefore simply never learned how.
Hazel, edged with something warmer — gold maybe, catching the thin thread of light from the gap in the curtains. For a moment it’s genuinely difficult to look away, which is not something I have time for and which I make a mental note to deal with later.
His voice is even. Not sharp, not surprised. Just a question.
“I was going to draw the curtains,” I say.
It comes out a fraction too quickly. I hear it as soon as it leaves my mouth.
“Don’t,” he says. Quiet, but completely certain. “Do not do that.”
He watches me for a moment. I can’t tell what he’s reading but something is definitely being read.
I incline my head slightly toward the tray — a small redirect, nothing more than necessary.
“Your breakfast is served. Is there anything else I can assist you with?”
At the threshold I pause just long enough for a small inclination of my head — the kind that’s proper without being excessive — and then I step out and pull the door shut behind me.
I stand in it for a moment and think about the curtains. About the way Maud had said draw the curtains — too carefully, too precisely, with that pause after. About the smirks.
I’d never worked in a house before. But I’d lived in one long enough to know how this worked.
I take my time on the way back down.
The kitchen is in full flow when I push through the door. Someone at the stove, someone at the sink, Maud at the central counter with her back half-turned.
She is, of course, absolutely watching the door.
I cross to the tray station and set the empty tray down. I’m barely through the door when she turns around.
There’s something in her voice that’s waiting. Waiting for flustered, for corrected, for smaller than when I left.
“Yes,” I say. “The tea was a good temperature. He seemed pleased.”
She waits. The room waits with her.
I don’t give them the other version.
“I drew the curtains as well,” I add. “He said thank you.”
The room goes quiet for a moment in a way that has nothing to do with noise.
Maud’s expression doesn’t change exactly. It just settles into something that has no good response and knows it.
“Right,” she says finally. “Good.”
I retie my apron and move toward the door.
“I’ll start on the east sitting room. Unless something else is needed first.”
I’m nearly through the door when I catch it — just at the edge of my vision.
Lev, still at his counter, not quite looking at Maud. His expression says nothing obvious. It has the quality of a man who has watched this before and arrived, not for the first time, at the same conclusion.
Leave it alone. It’s worse now.
I don’t smile until I’m in the corridor.
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Readers can read all books for free, without any ads and give the authors feedback.
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